The post-mobile age is here. Are you ready?

Internet-connected devices are about to change the game—again.

4 min read From Accenture

From Accenture10th March 2016

The math is simple and a little terrifying.

In 2020, there will probably be about 200bn Internet-connected devices and maybe 2bn adults using the Internet. In a world in which the Internet of Things (IoT) has gone from concept to reality, consumers will have more touch points to a brand than a business can reasonably keep track of.

Welcome to the “post-mobile age.” Or, as Gartner has termed it, “device mesh.”

Whatever the name, the vision is the same: An expanding set of endpoints will be available to access applications and information. That includes mobile devices, wearables and IoT devices like smart refrigerators and sensors.

IT departments are already struggling to keep up. To adapt, they will need to take a different approach, employ new tools and, above all, get faster.

IoT is for real

Whether the proliferation of IoT devices will ever hit the 200bn estimate is anyone’s guess. (Intel forecasts 200bn; Cisco’s prediction is about 50bn.) But companies can bank on that fact that today’s figure, around 15bn, will increase dramatically. The growth is being fueled by advances in wireless technology, smaller and cheaper silicon chips and cloud computing, which has made data processing on a grand scale possible.

The sudden rise of IoT has prompted many companies to rethink their IT strategies. “There are trillions of possible connections within that big device mesh,” says Fabien Papleux, IoT engineering practice lead for Accenture. “We’re talking to our clients about a future where there are all these devices and not enough humans to manage them.”

As a result, Charles King, president and principal analyst of Pund-IT, says security issues related to IoT could be profound. “For example, consider a scenario where your medical provider gives you a wearable device that tracks heart rate, blood pressure, etc., and automatically downloads that data to facilities where it can be analyzed and added to your electronic medical record,” King says. “A security breach of that device or network would obviously be important to you, but it could also be hugely costly to your provider and also lead to possible sanctions by regulatory agencies.”

Nevertheless, IoT is no passing fad. Papleux says that although the tech industry has a tendency to overhype new technologies—remember the early-2013 mania over Google Glass for instance?—IoT is for real. “I don’t think anything will stop IoT,” he says. “I compare IoT with e-commerce in the 1990s. There’s a lot of hype around IoT, but at the same time there’s actual value around it as well.”

Blockchains to the rescue?

Since devices will soon greatly outnumber humans, Papleux advocates a system in which the machines monitor themselves. “All of our computer models are based on human trust,” he says. “Most people don’t trust their neighbors.”

A practical solution, Papleux says, are blockchains. Best known as the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, blockchains are distributed records of a digital event that’s shared among many different parties and can only be updated by a consensus among most of the people in the system. Once entered, information in a blockchain can’t be erased, so there’s always a record.

In other words, a blockchain is sort of a permanent verification system that can’t be tampered with.

Although until now blockchains have mostly been used for financial transactions, Papleux sees them as an effective tool for device management. “You can now validate a transaction between Device A and Device B,” he says.

But can blockchains be hacked? “So far, it’s never been done,” says Papleux, “and as far as we know, it can’t be done.”

Evolving connection models

For the last few years, the rise of APIs has led to a focus on data, Papleux says, as the interfaces allowed software apps to communicate and exchange data with one another. The burgeoning IoT segment is having another effect: the value of infrastructure.

“I always take the example of beacon technology in an airport,” Papleux says. “The airport itself is interested in the volume of people inside an airport, but that information can be hugely interesting to a local business.” For instance, a local hotel could tap into the airport’s infrastructure to know when their guests are coming through the airport. As a result, Papleux says, we’ll not only see more cooperation between software, but there will also be a sharing of infrastructure within the app economy.

Two-speed IT

The explosion of Internet-connected devices and the possibility of creating new connections to infrastructure mean that IT departments, which are still adapting to mobile, are going to continue to struggle to keep up.

“If there’s one thing they need to learn, it’s to move faster,” Papleux says of IT departments. “They need to learn to move at start-up speed.” Papleux advocates a “two-speed IT” in which their back ends can follow their normal cycle of releases, but can also produce software and apps extremely rapidly to keep pace with the market. “Speed is key,” he says.

How far will IoT go?

Papleux’s vision isn’t quite as far out as that of Gartner analyst David Cearley, who foresees widespread use of chip implants in human bodies in the 2020s and advocates the use of neuromorphic architecture for computer systems that mimic the human brain.

However, the two agree that the thrust of IT will revolve around universal end-point management rather than mobile device management as it does today. Whatever the case, expect IT to become even more complex in the coming years as the Internet of Things becomes a real thing.